Rocketlane was founded in April 2020 by three second-time entrepreneurs, Srikrishnan Ganesan (CEO), Vignesh Girishankar (CPO), and Deepak Bala(CTO). They were previously responsible for building Konotor, which was sold to Freshworks in 2015 and subsequently relaunched as FreshChat, its in-app messaging product. The inspiration was the challenge they faced with onboarding customers onto FreshChat. They felt a new approach to PSA was needed.
I asked Sri for a short description of Rocketlane. He replied.
“Rocketlane is a modern, customer centric PSA platform, which is uniquely all in one. It’s truly about bringing together three pieces which are typically separate today. One is the project accounting people and finance piece. One is project management and process governance. Then there is the customer facing customer experience and accountability from a customer standpoint.
“Most PSAs today have time tracking, resource management, rate cards, project accounting, and they would have some form of project management. In almost every case where we talk to customers that have legacy PSA tools, they typically use at least five tools to actually work with customers. They have a PSA, they also have a project management tool. They may be using something for document collaboration, or communication with the customers, and survey tools, etc, separately.”
Rocketlane is growing fast. It has around 120 employees but several open roles across its two offices, one in Lehi, Utah, and one in Chennai, India. The company has over 500 customers, including several well-known brands such as Clari, OpenGov, and Fivetran. Its largest customer has around 1000+ users, and it has ambitions to get even larger customers.
What’s your vision for Rocketlane?
“Our vision is to elevate the whole client project delivery experience, both for internal teams working with clients, as well as for the clients themselves. And to become the default offering in this space.”
In the beginning
Why did you start Rocketlane?
“This is my second SaaS startup. I built a business from 2012 to 2015, which FreshWorks acquired. I spent the next four and a half years continuing to build that business within Freshworks. That is where I saw how PS teams inside software companies operated. There, were a lot of siloed tools that they were using to work with customers and to collaborate internally. There was a lot of mining of data happening outside, on spreadsheets, to share with leadership, finance and so on.
“Me and my co-founders felt there should be a better way to make all of this an all in one experience. And two, we found that there was a lot of anxiety, both internally and externally, surprises for the customer and surprises for leadership internally. We felt any project delivery has these challenges. None of the project management tools were focused on customer-facing projects first. We felt client-facing project delivery, your PSA as one experience, can be something very exciting.
“The reason to start the business was really, at FreshWorks, spending four and a half years in a company that scaled from around 18 million when we joined to around $230 million. It was inspiring to see what happened in the company. What happened to the people who joined the company in the early stages and grew with the company? That’s what inspired us to say, Hey, we’ve learned so much over here. Why don’t we go and do one more startup and, this time, optimised for the kind of journey that FreshWorks has had?”
Partnerships
Rocketlane has already built several integrations with CRM vendors such as Salesforce and Hubspot. There are also native integrations with Jira and Slack.
On the finance side, Sri revealed that they have integrations with NetSuite, QuickBooks and Sage Intacct. However, these are not partner integrations, and they do not (yet) appear on any marketplace belonging to those vendors. Other integrations have been completed using Workato.
Rocketlane signed up nCloud as a channel partner earlier this year. I asked Sri whether there is a formal partner program in place.
Sri replied, “We have a few partners. We haven’t been chasing partners today, we’ve been more opportunistic, where there is a good relationship that’s naturally emerged. nCloud, for example, was first a customer and then became a partner. We have a few of those.
“However, from our go-to-market standpoint, we have a BDR team that does outbound and we also have an inbound engine. We do a lot of stuff in the community. Nine months before we launched the product, we launched a community for implementation called Preflight. We also have a community called PS Club. We’ve been doing events for the last couple of years, like Propel. We also turn up at other big events, the TSIA conferences, and we are leaders on G2 as well, that helps.”
Preflight
You mentioned the Preflight Community; could you explain what that is?
“It is a 3,400-plus Slack member community. It needs approval to join. You submit a request to say why you’re trying to join it. A community manager will look at your profile and approve you. It has a lot of conversations going on for different stages of companies. It could be a very early-stage company talking about how I need to implement my software. How do I do that in a better way?
“It’s mostly implementation and PS teams inside software companies that you will find in this community. In some cases, partners of these companies as well.
“They discuss best practices and implementation. It’s not about Rocketlane. It’s thought leadership. It’s question and answer. That’s people hiring for new jobs in the space. We run webinars very frequently. We have two kinds of webinars that we run as part of Preflight. One is called implementation stories, which is about people coming in and talking about how they’re running implementation for their company, how it’s evolved, and what they have learned from it.
“Then, there are deep dives, which are more around a very specific topic. We also do physical events, which we call Preflight Huddles, which happen in different cities. There are city-wide chapter hosts who aren’t part of our company who organise these chapters and have their own events. We support them, sponsor them, and, if needed, find a place for them to go. We’re pretty passionate about the community.”
On 2024
What have you achieved this year?
“We’ve brought on some really big logos as customers. We’ve hosted our first one-day in-person conference this year, Propel. Our product has continued to evolve at a rapid pace. The interesting word a couple of customers have used to describe their reaction is that they’re ‘shocked’ at the pace at which our product has evolved. We’ve replaced a lot of the legacy tools consistently, we go head on head with them in many deals and have a very high win ratio. We have also raised new capital.”
That announcement was made after this interview with the firm, raising $24 million in a Series B round. Looking forward, Sri intends to maintain growth at 2.7-2.8X in terms of customers and revenue. Rocketlane is also moving up the market and will appoint a VP of Sales in the near future. It is also looking to build a mid-market and enterprise sales team in the US. There is similarly a growing focus on Europe, with plans to host its first in-person event in the region later in the year.
Why Rocketlane is different
There are a lot of PSA vendors around at the moment. What differentiates Rocketlane?
“I’d say there’s a few things. We’re seen as a very thoughtful and innovative product. We have truly brought new angles to what software in the space should do. We actually published our own PSA RFP late last year. That talks about how software should also be thinking about how to enable proactive governance.
“Not just take care of your financials and projects, but how do I tie the two together and bring early warnings to leaders, warnings around delivery going sideways? It’s not part of other software. You do it outside of the other software or reactively through dashboards. Governance is a key part that we enable from within Rockelane.”
Could you give me a specific example of that?
“I want an alert that you spent 60% of the project budget. Or if a key milestone slips by three days, I want my project owner to have an additional task on their plate, which gives us a self-correction mechanism. If it’s been six days, then alert their manager. If it’s been nine days then involve the leader of the function to provide their support and assistance and bring it back on track. All of that can be configured in the tool out of the box.”
Sri continued, “Also, the breadth of the product is also very unique. We have native CSAT, native documents, document templates, meeting notes, status updates, chat, forms, and communication templates for emails to be sent out. Think of it as the project delivery part is very strong here. It also has a separate module for partners that you may involve in your delivery. It could be strategic partners could be downstream partners.
“The customer portal is unique in how it brings together all of those pieces I mentioned above, in an experience where the customer doesn’t have to search through emails to understand what’s happening in a project that they signed up for. They can find all communication updates in one place.
“We have some very unique automation capabilities. One interesting thing we’ve done is subscription-type projects. Most PSA tools support fixed fees and time & material projects. We introduced this idea of a recurring type, subscription-type project, which I think others do workarounds for, like creating new projects.
“We introduced the resource AI module to help in one click. You can optimise for margins or balancing load in executing this project, and we will find the right team accordingly. Then, you can change the skills that you need, and it will automatically update with the suggested recommended person, (identifying) their forecasted utilisation and the project margin if you staff with these people.”
The Book question
What’s the latest book you read?
“It’s been a while. There is a VC podcast called Grit. The last one I listened to was by the CRO of Snowflake, who was talking actually about how Snowflake doesn’t have a customer success organisation. It’s only about PS. Which was interesting to me, we see some other companies following suit as well.
“The last book we wrote was Onboard and Upwards. It’s a book about how you should do your customer onboarding. It’s told in a story format. Similar to Five dysfunctions of a team (by Patrick Lencioni).
“We also just launched an ebook, 32 Things to Automate in your Professional Services Business. We believe that there is no automation today in professional services automation. You need to look beyond digitising when it comes to automation truly. We’ve laid out which areas you can truly automate. And those are all things, of course, you can do in Rocketlane.”
